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Pandemic coverage for a not-so-new flu

Suddenly, it's all bird flu all the time. Did the president's remarks spark this?

By ERIC DEGGANS
Published October 17, 2005

She has covered other high-profile disease scares, including SARS and anthrax.

But Canadian health reporter Helen Branswell remains amazed at how the coverage of avian flu risks has gone "thermonuclear" this week and last. Branswell remembered exactly when she knew the disease had become mainstream media's next disaster obsession.

"Suddenly, it seemed as if it was all bird flu all the time on CNN," said Branswell, a medical reporter for the Canadian Press news service, who has been covering the spread of the flu virus since January 2004. "Literally, one day I had a TV set on my desk, I was looking over, and every show had a story: The Situation Room , Anderson Cooper, Paula Zahn. It became the bird flu network."

Cable TV's blanket coverage also caught the eye of Maryn McKenna, science and health writer for the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper.

McKenna, who thinks she may have written the first story on avian flu risks in the American media eight years ago, has seen local podcasters offering updates on the story - a sure sign Joe and Jane Sixpack are paying attention.

"Tipping point is such an overused phrase, but something tipped in the last few weeks," she said.

"There was quite a long period where I wrote (avian flu) stories and they landed on Page 3. ... And if there's an upside to everyone landing on this story at once, it's that everybody recognizes the value of it."

Ask why the media is suddenly focused on this issue - and the disastrous consequences if the virus mutates into a high-mortality disease easily transmitted among humans - and the answers vary.

Some reasons include: continued progress of the flu through birds in China, Russia and Turkey; recent completion of a 10-year effort to map the gene segments of a similar virus from 1918; a sense through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that government and technology may not prevent natural disasters in America; and prominent preparation talk by government officials, especially an Oct. 4 news conference by President Bush.

From the cover of this month's National Geographic to a stream of stories on National Public Radio and headlines in the Wall Street Journal , Los Angeles Times , Miami Herald and elsewhere, the spike in coverage on avian flu has both gratified and puzzled experts, who say this risk has been around since 2003.

"Essentially, there's nothing new (recently), other than the study (of the 1918 virus) and cases in Indonesia this summer," noted David Daigle, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who said he received an average of about 18 press calls each day toward the middle of last week, about three times the normal volume.

"I would tell some reporters, every year 36,000 Americans are killed and 200,000 Americans are hospitalized from outbreaks of the regular domestic flu," said Daigle, who knew coverage had peaked when the Daily Show spoofed the issue and his fourth-grade daughter asked about it. "Here you are in flurry over a flu that really hasn't killed anyone (in America) yet."

Still, there's little doubt about the danger. The latest strain of the avian flu, known clinically as H5N1, already has killed 60 people in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia since 2003 - bearing a similarity to the virus that killed 50-million people worldwide in 1918.

Experts say the illness, if it emerges simultaneously across a wide geographic area in a "pandemic," could kill many more people than better known threats such as bioterrorism or AIDS. U.S. officials are still struggling to develop preparedness plans and vaccination efforts.

"This past cycle, you've seen 117 cases now and half those people have died," said Sanjay Gupta, a practicing neurosurgeon who also serves as senior medical correspondent for CNN.

"A virus that kills one in two people ... those are alarming numbers by anybody's standard," said Gupta, speaking by cell phone Thursday just before jumping on a flight to Southeast Asia to cover the story.

"We in the medical unit have been paying attention to this for some time. But when the president started talking about it, we decided to do some of our reporting early."

Indeed, Bush's public statements on preparing for a possible avian flu pandemic likely had the greatest impact on spurring widespread recent coverage - from comments he made in September to the United Nations and after a meeting with Russian President Valdimir Putin, to an Oct. 4 news conference where he suggested using the military to quarantine an outbreak.

Bush's statement - in which he waved off an attempt to change the subject to provide more details - made it plain to the world's media that the president had been thinking on the subject.

"I certainly wasn't expecting to get (Bush repeating) his full briefing book to us," said National Journal reporter Alexis Simendinger, who asked about the issue after noticing renewed efforts to complete a federal preparedness plan, and a bestselling book on the 1918 outbreak on the president's summer reading list.

"When President Bush seems thoughtful or prepared ... his detractors want to think there's something comical about it," said Simendinger, disputing notions that Bush's extensive answer indicated he expected the question. "I didn't know the president would use the word quarantine or be as direct as he was. He wanted the American public to see that he was on it - could tell you the virus' name."

Still some experts fear reporters' focus on an impending crisis may ultimately harm attempts to spread public awareness about avian flu.

"If an outbreak doesn't happen in the next few months, I'm convinced there will be a backlash," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "There's this tendency to make it a Katrina-like (disaster) story. And people will be saying somebody in Washington is trying to manipulate the news cycle and you scared us unnecessarily."

But, even as he criticizes the crisis focus of most recent reporting, Osterholm predicts an avian flu pandemic that would strike much of the country at once, making it impossible to mount a federal response or vaccinate the huge numbers of affected people.

"This might not happen this year, but it is going to happen," he said, noting history has seen 10 flu pandemics in the past 300 years. "We need to figure out how to sustain meaningful news coverage in a professional way. ... We need to scare people into their wits, not out of them."

--Times researcher Angie Holan contributed to this report. Eric Deggans can be reached at 727 893-8521 or deggans@sptimes.com See his blog at www.sptimes.com/blogs/media

[Last modified October 17, 2005, 10:03:57]